The Covenant signatory Cornellà de Llobregat (Spain) developed a support scheme for people in a situation of energy poverty using money raised during the traditional public run.

In 2015, the Municipality of Cornellà de Llobregat, noticed an aggravation of energy poverty in its territory, due to the effects of the economic crisis on family income, the power market situation in Spain and the poor conditions of some homes in the city.

The city council decided to reframe the traditional popular public run, which takes place within the framework of the cities’ local festivities and the EU energy week and use it to create awareness of energy poverty among its participants. In order to do so, the city council contracted a non-profit consultancy expert on energy poverty, Ecoserveis, to develop informational material that was set in key parts of the run so that the participants could see how many calories they burned and what this meant in kWh.

In addition, the municipality decided to give a monetary value to:

• The average calories burned by each one of the participants in the popular run (in kWh);

• The total amount of calories burned by the participants in the energy-poverty-related activities that took place during the EU energy week in Cornellà.

Thanks to the 2017 and 2018 edition of the run, the municipality collected €52,000! With this amount, a total of 110 energy audits have been carried out in vulnerable households in the municipality. The Energy Efficiency Office of the municipality have been monitoring the audits, in order to determine to what extent the saving measures proposed are effective.

After 3 editions, the city council believes that the activity has been very popular among both the organisers and participants. In addition, it believes that it is necessary to put an emphasis on the link between communicating about energy poverty and being able to reach very specific groups that have traditionally been made invisible, and are especially affected by energy poverty, such as the elderly. Furthermore, thanks to the allocated money, resources were used to help tackle energy poverty among these groups.